I'm never quite prepared for the arrival of August 32nd. I have noticed the warning signs -- the crickets drown out the locusts in the battle of the bands, the tomato vines produce smaller fruit as the soil tires and the plants lose energy, monarch butterflies flutter over fading zinnias, and the sun sets too soon -- but I have denied that the change to fall is imminent, because when the temperature breaks 100° day after day that's easy to do.

Tomorrow, from radios in backyards, the sound of college football games will drift quietly throughout the neighborhood as die-hard football fans listen to the games less important to their sense of continuity -- the games they can listen to rather than view or attend -- while they turn their compost and weed around their chrysanthemums. The Nebraska game with San Jose State, for instance.

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies

That famous line from James Wright's poem "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" might just as easily apply to September and the beauty of a fall afternoon. It doesn't, of course; its setting is October (a not unimportant difference, I think) and the speaker's sense of desperation and futility is greater than the average football fan's is likely ever to become, but the words "suicidally beautiful", the cornerstone of the poem, resonate. Afternoons in fall are suicidally beautiful, but beautiful enough to live through, even beautiful enough to live for, and dissonantly and disturbingly so, as dissonant and disturbing as Wright's art.

Reading: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third one, when time has permitted. And I've been browsing through a collection of James Wright's poems.

Watched: (Friday late) A favorite rerun, Kiss of the Spiderwoman. I enjoy this movie for much the same reason that I enjoyed watching Six Degrees of Separation a few weeks ago: for the wit of the dialog, but more importantly, for the breadth and depth of the dialog.